Mobile Advertising: Have Cell, Will Sell

With its SoLoMo superpower, a global smartphone-using audience of one billion – and counting – and infinite innovations such as apps, SMS campaigns and easy e-commerce, mobile advertising is surely the new darling of the industry. But how can marketers distinguish between engaging consumers and, by popping up on deeply personal devices, irritating the hell out of them? Isobel Roberts tunes into the ringtones

First thing in the morning, and last thing at night; on the way into work, and over lunch; during the 5pm meeting and again in the queue at the supermarket; while watching television and even in the bathroom – for many of us, checking our mobile phones is an almost irrepressible urge. Glued to our hands, in an age of almost ubiquitous connectivity, we use our cherished devices for everything from socialising with friends to online shopping to watching movies. Fuelled by the launch of the iPhone in 2007, quickly followed by the Android operating system in 2008, smartphone use has skyrocketed in the past five years and today there are more than one billion smartphone users across the globe. It’s the most personalised device we have, and as consumers have increasingly turned to mobiles and tablets, advertisers have followed. Indeed, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) calculated that more than $5.3 billion was spent on mobile advertising worldwide in 2011, with the US market for mobile advertising having more than quadrupled in value in four years, from half a billion dollars in 2009 to more than $2 billion in 2012. Pretty impressive numbers, it can’t be denied. So what is making mobile so attractive to marketers and ad agencies?

As an industry that can’t resist a bit of insider jargon, the phrase ‘SoLoMo’ goes some way to explaining what all the fuss is about. A portmanteau of social, local and mobile, it’s the mobile device’s power to combine both social media and location-based technology that has got many agencies embracing this interactive channel. “Mobile allows the advertiser to engage with a consumer based on who they are, where they are, when they are – as in time of day – and what they’re doing,” says Paul Berney, chief marketing officer and managing director for EMEA at the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), a non-profit trade association aimed at educating and promoting mobile. “That kind of contextual relevance is really only possible to that degree through the mobile channel – it’s the only channel that allows you to be that targeted.”

Berney cites Small Business Saturday, the American Express initiative in the US that was masterminded by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, as a great example of this. On its nominated day – the day following Black Friday – the brand encouraged citizens to support their local community and celebrate small business, and mobile users could claim special offers exclusively for use on Small Business Saturday from shops in their local neighbourhood by checking in to them on Foursquare. Launched in 2011, the 2012 edition was even more successful and showed the potency of a strong idea combined with mobile technology.

“We’re storytellers, and good storytelling relies on connecting with your audience,” says creative director Alex Romans from Johannes Leonardo, the New York shop that scored the first Mobile Grand Prix in Cannes, in collaboration with Grow Interactive, for Google’s Coke app. “Mobile means that connection can now happen at the right time, in the right place and be more intimate than ever before. That’s extremely powerful.”

Mobile’s strength, then, is to add in contextual relevance like no other medium, but mobile advertising doesn’t always have to be linked to both the social and the local to be successful. In a nod to its thriving role in advertising innovation and creativity, last year Cannes Lions launched the aforementioned Mobile Lions and the category winners came in all shapes and sizes, including mobile apps, rich content ads,?simple SMS campaigns, QR codes, web applications and mobile coupons. The excitement for the category is echoing around the agency world too. “A good barometer for the category is the perceived value of a mobile brief within a creative department,” continues Romans. “Not long ago, a mobile brief would have been all but ignored by the best minds in the agency. Now those same briefs are fought for because everyone sees the opportunity to create amazing work.”

The rules of engagement

The depth and breadth of winners at Cannes showcased mobile’s wide-reaching potential, yet at the same time the consumer’s relationship witha mobile device is intimate, and it can be a fine line between engaging with or irritating consumers.

“People carry around their phones and they’re looking at them constantly,” comments Tom Eslinger, worldwide creative innovation director at Saatchi & Saatchi, and jury president of that first Cannes Mobile Lions category. “It’s become this kind of thing that we’re always connected to and if you try to intrude into that relationship it’s a really personal thing, and so the real simple question to ask is ‘would you do that?’. If you’re walking down the street and you get pinged an invitation to go to a nightclub, or an offer from a nearby supermarket, would that piss you off more than it would make you happy?”

Kevin Brown, digital director at London agency Brothers and Sisters – who picked up their first Mobile Lion win last June – agrees: “We must remember, it’s a privilege to be on people’s devices. As an advertiser, it doesn’t matter how much you’ve paid to be there, you have to make it count when you show up on people’s phones. And this is pushing creatives, clients and developers to get it right first time. Be it an app or a piece of innovative mobile advertising, there’s nowhere to hide on a mobile device, which is hugely motivating to create something exemplary. There is a vast app graveyard out there where agencies have produced experiences which are nothing more than vanity projects. Clients should demand more accountability from mobile products and, likewise, agencies should look at the benefits a legacy product can do for their commercial relationships.”

With the deeply personal nature of the mobile device, one route to success for mobile initiatives has been to seize on utility as a way to interact with customers, and mobile apps that are useful as well as engaging for consumers have tended to reap the highest rewards. Entertainment and gaming has been another avenue, with examples such as Barclaycard’s Waterslide Extreme game racking up more than 12 million downloads at the last count. However, the figures on branded apps don’t always paint a pretty picture. According to data from Deloitte, more than 80 per cent of apps put out by major consumer brands gain less than 1,000 downloads, while just one per cent clock up one million or more. But just as brands on the web moved from their own dedicated microsites to the channels where their audience were already living, such as YouTube and Facebook, the same pattern is now beginning to emerge in the mobile world.

“Trying to invest a $50,000 punt on mobile with no media support is almost guaranteed for failure,” says Eslinger. “You have to get the app out in front of people, because if there’s one app that does something there’s probably 10 more. We’re getting past that stage now, and it’s about creating property for clients and then trying to figure out how to weave it into something somebody has already done, someone else’s real estate. To build standalone takes a lot of money and a lot of time, and in the amount of time it takes you to build your own standalone experience, then your market has probably moved by.”

Africa goes mobile

Of course mobile advertising is not just restricted to the realm of the smartphone. Much of the growth in the US and Western Europe has been triggered by the spread of mobile internet, but in areas with a less developed telecommunications network and less sophisticated devices, the industry has still witnessed huge increases in mobile advertising – as is the case in Africa.

“It’s come off the base of, literally, zero a few years back, to being one of the biggest and most widespread advertising channels,” comments Chris Gotz, executive creative director, Ogilvy & Mather Cape Town. “Africa’s communication infrastructure was, and probably still is, the weakest in the world. The huge reach that mobile has suddenly delivered, in the absence of any other reliable and pervasive mediums, has been a godsend for advertisers.”

Gotz’s agency won the continent’s first Mobile Lion last summer with its Carling Black Label Be the Coach campaign, which used simple text-based formats to allow fans to pick the players for a local football derby, as well as being able to make live substitutions on the day of the game. Not heavy in technology, but still effective in idea and implementation.

At the other end of the scale are locations such as Japan, where the technology infrastructure is more advanced, and mobile internet has been longer established than in its Western counterparts. There, mobile technology is already more integrated into consumer behaviour through innovations such as ‘mobile wallets’ – which are being introduced into other markets too – meaning that mobile campaigns can be easier to implement and are taken up by more consumers. For Masa Kawamura, partner and creative director at Tokyo and New York-based ad agency PARTY, the most important element, however, still lies in mobile’s relevance to an idea: “It’s a window that connects you to a bigger world 24-7, which you simply keep inside your pocket. There’s no other device like that. [But] even though it’s an amazing device to communicate on, it doesn’t mean you always have to use it. The richness of content and the level of craft you can make on mobile is still not as great compared to TV and PCs, so you need to choose the right medium and the right combinations to use in your campaign.”

The industry recipe for mobile success appears to be one of viewing mobile as an integral part of the media mix and bringing it to the table right from the ideation stage, rather than tacking on a mobile translation at the end. The number of specialist mobile agencies and talent being integrated into mainstream shops is on the rise as agencies beef up their skill sets, but for some more traditional marketers there is still a battle of ideas to be won.

“Part of the challenge,” explains MMA’s Berney, “is that still, in many instances, the most senior people in marketing have grown up trained in a world where reach and frequency is everything in advertising, and of course that’s not necessarily the world of mobile marketing. We’re not pushing to reach the greatest number of people as you possibly can. Mobile marketing is becoming a much more targeted media that says we want to reach the right people at the right time with the right message. So part of that is having to work against what others might think of as the prevailing best practice for running things, but also changing people’s minds to move away from broadcast media, where your message can potentially be seen by 10 million people but only reacted upon by 100,000 people, to a world where you reach those 100,000 people first.”

The signal is clear

Going forward, mobile penetration is only set to increase, so any brand ignoring mobile in its line-up of advertising activities does so at its own peril. Non-smartphones still outweigh smartphones in number across the globe by around five to one, but smartphones are dominating new device purchases in parts of the world such as the US and Asia, and smartphone usage is also on the up in areas with less developed networks, such as Africa. Mobile purchases also now overshadow the number of personal computers sold. Currently, the advertising dollars poured into mobile compared to the amount of time consumers spend on the channel is much lower than the corresponding figures for TV, print, radio and even the web, but, with global internet use set to double by 2015 – mainly at the hands of mobile devices – this inevitably means a greater surge in mobile advertising.

“More and more of our audience will be on smartphones and mobile devices,” believes JWT New York’s director of digital production, Paul Sutton, “so we are constantly looking at how they are using their devices and what their expectations are. We’ll likely see more videos and rich content on mobile as users upgrade to 4G devices. Also, as payment, ticketing, and couponing are stored on mobile devices, users will see their phones as an extension of their wallet. There will likely be increased applications for consumer-packaged goods marketers to engage and reward their consumers, as well as incentives for geo-based activity, including check-ins.”

The ability to close the payment loop when it comes to e-commerce is another string to mobile’s bow that many brands will be hoping to cash in on. Quickly and simply taking a consumer from promotion to purchase point – whether via an app or mobile browser – the trend of mobile payments is growing rapidly as more and more consumers adopt the technology. Because, in the end, the biggest driver of mobile advertising is going to be the technology itself; as developers constantly improve and push out new functions, it’s the resulting effect on consumer behaviour that brands and advertisers will be eagerly tapping into. 

“I would say that the biggest change that agencies and brands are having to react to is actually the change that we’re bringing about as consumers,” states Berney from the MMA. “Our behaviour is being changed by mobile, as its both causing and enabling us to behave differently, and I actually think that the consumer behaviour is still well ahead of where brands and agencies are in the mobile space.”

When smart becomes second nature

Back to the technology, and there are all kinds of new developments in the pipeline, as well as emerging technologies, that will at some point become second nature to consumers: “As we go further and further forward, the more features they put into the phone, the more it’ll drive its use in marketing,” believes Saatchi’s Eslinger, “so it’ll revolve around Siri and voice control stuff, image recognition, enhanced photo recognition, code scanners, more search – things like that. Those trends will keep on playing out more and more as you go through marketing.”

And as clients become more comfortable with the channel, the hope is that its potential to include strong KPIs and produce-relevant data will also be a pull towards integrated mobile campaigns, alongside its creative capacity. Telecommunications operators such as O2, Orange and Vodafone in the UK are already working towards this assumption through the launch of mobile marketing schemes such as O2 More, a preference database built around its customers. It allows advertisers to pick and choose the precise audiences that they wish to target. But that’s only one side of the coin, and as more and more of our everyday activities are transferred on to our mobile devices, we’re likely to see a growing increase in more innovative campaigns as the industry continues to put its creative weight behind the medium.

“Pretty soon phones won’t be phones anymore, they will just be our ‘devices’,” sums up Gotz. “We’ll do pretty much everything with them – communicate, pay, watch TV, store vouchers and brochures, check our social feeds, use them as mobile workstations, to help find our way. In fact we use them to do most of those things already, so the potential for advertising and communication is obviously massive – unlimited if you like.”

The challenge is on.